Old Doctor Who question: What's 'DARDIS' supposed to stand for?

[Scooter]

DARDIS was used in the third Dalek serial, "The Chase" (1965), to refer to the Dalek time machines. (This is the first time we see directly that the Daleks have developed the capacity for time travel, though some capacity for this might be implied from the earlier "Dalek Invasion of Earth," which seems to take place in a different time frame from the original Dalek episode on their home planet of Skaro.)

But DARDIS was of course only a production shorthand and I'll bet the producers figured to stood for exactly what JVTruman thought it did.

"The Chase" btw has some very cool trivia. It includes a clip of the Beatles from Top of the Pops (which one of the characters refers to as "classical music"); this is the only clip of the Beatles from Top of the Pops to survive, which is a double escape considering how much of Doctor Who from this period was destroyed.

It also features a scene on the observation deck of the Empire State Building, complete with a yahoo hillbilly American. I think -- correct me if I'm wrong -- that this is the only time Doctor Who presents itself as being in the US until this year's "Daleks in Manhattan", 42 years later (I wonder if that episode will reference this scene in "The Chase"?) "The Two Doctors" was scheduled to go on location in New Orleans, but ended up in Seville. And the only two "American" regulars, Peri and Jack, were encountered in Lanzarote and London.

DARDIS parallels another joking acronym which got a lot more mileage: in "The War Games" the time-travel cabinets, which used Time Lord technology, were referred to as SIDRATs in the production notes, and my recollection is that the word actually made it into the hastily written scripts for the episodes, though other sources say no. The writer Malcolm Hulke later decided that SIDRAT stands for "Space and Inter-Dimensional Robot All-purpose Transporter"!